Subversive smells prompt subversive reactions

The "smelly migrant" is the most subversive of all migrants. Societies, including Australia, have ways of controlling the practice of other cultures, languages, customs or religions, but bodily odours just can't be contained.

They ooze out of our pores as invisible particles, detected only by the odorant receptors in the nasal cavity.

And by the time the receptors have signalled the brain's olfactory cortex to register "yuck", my immigrant bodily emissions have already penetrated your body, invaded you.

It's no coincidence then that fear of "the other" is often expressed as odour-based slurs.

Societies often denigrate the foods of newcomers as stinky and revolting.

In Medieval Europe, there was a common belief that Jewish bodies gave off an unpleasant stench — what was called "foetor judaicus".

If smelly bodies are subversive, so too are our reactions to them.

It's virtually impossible to control our immediate responses to pungent odours, and the anatomy of our brains helps to explain this.

Other senses are largely processed within the neo-cortex, the "higher" brain, while the sensory recognition of odours is more thoroughly plumbed into the limbic system, a collection of "lower" brain regions that are critical for emotion and memory.

Whatever is tickling the nose hairs has a direct line to the sub-verbal, animalistic self.

Philosopher Immanuel Kant categorised this perception of smell or olfaction as the most ignoble of senses, animalistic, "fleeting and transitory", not worthy of cultivation and not easily defined.

And it's exactly the amorphous nature of smell that makes it so powerful, and political.

For when those odours that repel us are associated with race, the disgust we instinctively sense undermines our attempts to overcome racial prejudices.

Shifting attitudes to diverse foods

But just as increased awareness of other cultural practices can help unravel prejudice, exposure to different ethnic culinary traditions that produce ethnic bodily smells can also temper those deep seated emotional reactions to the whiff of the unknown.

"A lot of people are scared or uncomfortable with the unknown," Korean cooking teacher Heather Jeong explains.

Her mission is to enlighten Australians on how to make and enjoy "robust, pungent Korean foods" like kimchi. "Once they gain knowledge and understanding, they embrace it," she says.

Certainly, Australians seem to revel in the culinary diversity that's now on offer.

Celebrity chefs are no longer mostly white, male and cook meat with stuff on the side, but hail from a variety of ethnic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds.

In fact, I've experienced first hand the shift in attitudes to my food culture. As a child, I endured culinary bullying when friends turned their noses up at seaweed and raw fish. But today, some families eat more sushi than steak, and I'm constantly asked to share recipes.

But how much diversity do Australians really embrace?

Ruth De Souza, a researcher in health and cultural issues, critiques the way Australians celebrate only select ethnic foods as symbols of our successful multiculturalism.

"I know people who will go to an Indian restaurant and always order butter chicken, and won't order anything else," claims Dr De Souza, who has an Indian background.

But championing only the foods deemed tolerable by the dominant culture is to circumscribe what's acceptably palatable multiculturalism. The effect is to reinforce a certain kind of "Australian-ness" rather than inclusive diversity.

So what would diversity smell like? Pretty rank, I'd presume, as it needs to include De Souza's curried tongue sandwiches that she took to school as a child, as well as one of my favourite dishes — simmered fish head with daikon (white radish).

Cooked daikon lingers like a lousy fart, so I'd never offer this to the uninitiated for fear of being met with disgust.

Distaste and disgust may seem like random reactions to malodourous concoctions. But they function in society to manage "ethnic excess".

Fish is OK, as long as it isn't pungent. Curry is nice, as long as the spices don't cling to the curtains. Kimchi is healthy, as long as the fermented garlic doesn't linger on the train.

But for the migrant who feels displaced from their homeland, foods that olfactorily offend may play an important role in reinforcing identity, Dr De Souza says.

She says cooking and eating a beautiful curry is akin to "putting lotion on the part of me that feels dislocated, lonely, and isolated". But that same curry can reek of spices that ultimately isolate her by making her smell different, even invoking disgust.

The result is a kind of ethnic shame that further reinforces just how out of place a fragrant migrant body really is.

In other words, what migrants ingest in order to maintain their identities in the host country can be the thing that viscerally sets them apart.

So is there such a thing as olfactory assimilation?

Can kimchi-breathing Koreans or cumin-flavoured Indians ever be rendered acceptably odourless? If I vow to never again revel in my daikon burps, will I feel more Australian?

Dr De Souza thinks not. In her view, attempting nutritional assimilation and sanitisation to become odourless rarely leads to a deeper, thicker sense of belonging. Like citizenship, that belonging feels "thin when compared to the affective power of ethnic identity", she claims.